Notes: This one confused me for a bit, the pores are red. This tends to me a serious taxonomic feature for Boletes, so it was a concern. But I was told sometimes this happens in B. chrysenteron if it freezes at some point in dev. Which must have happened here, everything else looks like a B. chrysenteron, but the pores are red.

So, something to look out for perhaps, sometimes the pores can be red.

Okey-dokey – I’ll give B. mendocinensis a try here… I’ll have to see if I find more of these in the future.

Comments

Next itme I find another “weather/age” induced red-pored “chysenteron” I will take it home and look at it more closely. The ones that I saw were in the East Bay. Sounds like they are not so rare after all, but of course this just might be “their” (whoever they might be) big year.

Last Monday I also collected a group of “red-pored” chrysenteron-like specimens at Tomales Bay SP, very simolar to yours. I was going to call them B. truncatus because of the lack of red in the fissures of the cap and the relatively quick bluing reactions. The spores however were rather irregular in size, some appearing truncated but not all by any means and some larger appearing ones. However, I’ve seen these superficial type of red pores even on B. edulis, so I’m not sure this is anything more than some kind of environmental feature. I’ll post some photos when I get my slides back.
I did save and dry them.

But when I showed these to Dr. Desjardin, he was pretty dismissive of them, and had me convinced they were just beat-up frozen, bad, old chrysenteron. And people were going over a bunch of different collections that day in class, so these got lost in the rush, and ended up in the trash. I’ll look for others, but don’t know. There is a note in the Boletes of CA that the spore size is large in this one than the normal chrys., so there might be something other than just the red pores to split the species.

This is the third collection I’ve seen. The others were from Humboldt Co. and Santa Barbara Co. I suspect that red-pored chrysenteron like collections are often over looked. I also think it is very possible that this is really an environmental or racial characteristic. Freezing seems unlikely to me given the collection I saw from Santa Barbara. That said, it would be really great to document this species/phenomenon.

Arora mentions this species as essentially a red pored version of Xercomus chrysenteron. Whether it is a good species or a weather effect, I don’t know. My bias would be to list it as X. mendocinensis since that’s more specific as well as a local species (Thiers). As far as I know it has not been formally transferred from Boletus to Xerocomus, so you’d be even more justified in calling Boletus mendocinensis than you are in currently calling it Boletus chrysenteron :-).